RAW, RAUNCHY AND MIDDLE-AGED

RAW, RAUNCHY AND MIDDLE-AGED; Rolling Stone Keith Richards at 45

By Bob Spitz; Bob Spitz is the author of ''Dylan: A Biography.''

Published: June 4, 1989

KEITH RICHARDS'S FACE shows an odd mixture of relief and satisfaction as he reviews his latest chart success. The 45-year-old rock star is interred in the back seat of a limousine, and New York City's rush hour is advancing his reputation for excessive lateness. The triumph under discussion is not another Rolling Stones record, but a doctor's appointment - ''My first in nine years,'' Richards exults - required by contract for all band members before commencing a tour. ''The bugger stuck electrodes all over my body, hooked up more monitors to me than the Stones use on stage, and told me I was - normal!'' The irony in his tone is palpable. ''I mean, can you imagine anyone telling Keith Richards he was normal?''

Even as he poses the question, Richards's face breaks into an expansive grin. It amuses, probably even delights him, especially at this point in his life, when most middle-aged rock stars are cliches. Or dead. Richards has lurched toward both extremes, and bounced back. Today, with a critically acclaimed solo album and tour under his belt and a Rolling Stones album and tour coming up in late summer, he is very much relevant to the pop scene, and relentlessly alive.

If ''normal'' is stretching things, Richards can at least claim a certain consistency. Through it all, he has held on to his trademark attitude, a calculated blend of impertinence and bravado. It's been a key ingredient in his success, but ultimately, as it assumed mythic dimensions, it placed his career - and his life - in danger.

As a member of the Rolling Stones, masters of the hip, anti-social and sexually self-indulgent pose, Richards helped change the morals of a generation. The Stones were the first rock 'n' roll band whose original members claimed to live out the message of their music. The claim was mostly fiction. True, Brian Jones died an untimely, drug-related death. But the rest of the group lived like landed gentry. Keith Richards lived on the edge.

There were stretches in the mid-1970's when the stories about his drug addiction and fondness for guns eclipsed the notoriety of the band. Fistfights and generally belligerent behavior contributed to his destructive - and self-destructive - image. Then, in 1977, his arrest for heroin possession nearly rent the Stones asunder. Things got so bad that Richards's current manager, Jane Rose (who worked for the Rolling Stones at the time), says she used to check the newspaper each morning to see if he was still alive.

Against somewhat staggering odds, Keith Richards survived what he calls ''that period of moral ambivalence.'' His life has since taken a more temperate turn, with no apparent loss of creative energy. He is no longer dependent on hard drugs, and he seems as inventive and productive as ever.

Still, there are times when he seems haunted by the past -especially now, when every performance is measured against his legend. Rock 'n' roll's quintessential ''bad boy'' now finds that his outlandish persona, carefully cultivated over the years, has become so closely identified with the music that neither age nor new-found wisdom can change it fundamentally. So Richards has had to be content with slight modifications.

''No matter how wild I've been perceived to be, there is now basically a fairly honest image,'' says Richards. ''In its most exaggerated forms, I cringe. But I don't feel totally divorced from it. I don't anguish about it. For me, the music is the important thing, and the image comes from the way I play it.''

With the Rolling Stones, his repertory of tough, gritty riffs made his reputation as perhaps the most important guitar player of his generation. Unlike such virtuosos as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page, he developed a signature technique - a barbed, percussive phrasing - that sustained an entire body of pop classics: ''Satisfaction,'' ''The Last Time,'' ''Jumping Jack Flash,'' ''Honky-Tonk Women,'' ''Brown Sugar'' - the list goes on and on.

Now, more than 25 years after the Rolling Stones's first hit record, Keith Richards has re-emerged, with a debut solo album, ''Talk Is Cheap,'' that was last year's sleeper success. He followed that with a sold-out tour of 15 cities this past winter. Hailed as a hard-driving, compulsive, wilfully imperfect masterpiece of root rock music, the album appeared at a time of personal upheaval - in his approach toward popular music, in the evolution of the Rolling Stones and in Richards's attitude toward his personal myth.

The three strands are delicately intertwined. Binding them together is his longtime friend, collaborator and nemesis -Mick Jagger.

WE'RE SUCH A STAH-RANGE couple.'' Richards delivers the line with exaggerated theatricality. He rolls his eyes, curls a scornful lip, then sighs in exasperation.

The subject of Jagger (who refused to be interviewed for this article) is vexing and unavoidable. We've been huddled in Richards's cavernous apartment in lower Manhattan, and within 10 minutes the name threatens to dominate the conversation. Mick Jagger is the hidden hand, the shadow force, in the Keith Richards story. In any reference book on pop music, the names Jagger and Richards constitute a single entry. They are the Rolling Stones.